02 October 2012 5:28 PM

One Nation Ed has made off with Cameron's clothes

By Tim Shipman

Ed Miliband has just pulled off something that few politicians achieve. He has cheered his party faithful, rewritten the conventional wisdom about himself and, I suspect, sent a tiny frisson of fear rippling through Downing Street.

By seeking to brand his party as One Nation Labour, he has stolen a Tory title of which David Cameron sees himself as the inheritor and sought to reposition the once union-shackled Red Ed of 2010 in the centre ground of British politics.

It was not a perfect speech, none is. Remarkably, for a speech delivered without notes, it was too long by a good 10 minutes.

It was utterly vacuous in terms of policy detail and Mr Miliband still refuses to accept that Labour spent like drunken sailors in the good times. But if politicians are allowed one big picture speech shorn of policy per term, the conference 3 years before an election is the best time to do it.

Mr Miliband's references to his secular faith, that everyone should be jolly nice to each other and make everything better, were among the most cloying and banal sections of any speech I have ever heard.

There were also too many lazy, cheap applause lines like getting the audience to boo Michael Gove, an education secretary whose flagship policy has been to put rocket boosters under the schools reforms of Tony Blair and Andrew Adonis.

But Mr Miliband has shown that he has the guts to deliver a speech without notes and the brain to memorise it. In that he has matched David Cameron. He has shown a modicum of geeky charm, riffing on his son Daniel's desire for 'dinosaurs' in the speech (tragically, a missed opportunity for a good gag at the expense of union barons).

The Labour leader also tried a bit of 'I told you so' referencing his lines about producers and predators from last year's disastrously delivered pol-sci lecture. 'One year on people know what I was talking about,' he said. They sure as hell had no idea a year ago.

But it is a measure of Mr Miliband's improvement that the problems with speech were
what he left out (lack of guts on the economy and a lack of the big idea). Last year the problem was largely with what he included.

Most importantly, he managed to ram home the most damaging accusation against the Tories, that they are a bunch of incompetent, pleb-denouncing public school rapscallions in a way that is memorable.

By wrapping himself in the mantra of 'one nation' (a phrase you will now see in every speech and press release the Labour Party issues), a man who usually takes 22 long words to say anything has dramatised the alleged difference between the two main parties in two words. And he has used a Tory slogan, appropriated from David Cameron's heroes Benjamin Disraeli and Harold Macmillan, to do it. That is the measure of a successful speech and it will get them thinking in No 10.

It is as if the PM went off for a spot of skinny dipping and returned to the beach to find Mr Miliband wearing his Vilebrequins.

In short it was the best conference speech by a Labour leader since Tony Blair's barnstorming valedictory in 2006 and the most politically significant since Blair's backs-against-the-wall effort in the midst of the Iraq quagmire and Brown's serial disloyalty in 2004.

David Miliband left the conference this morning to avoid 'overshadowing' his brother. A year ago when Ed Miliband's leadership was on the line this was a sensible move. Now it looks arrogant in its irrelevance. If the embittered elder brother did watch the speech, he will have been weeping over the CV he is presumably now writing.

Ed Miliband has not won the general election. His ideas are often banal, his policies, where they exist, are often ill thought out. But he will be listened to more closely now.

The British public may not yet believe that a Labour Party still in hock to the unions and in denial about its economic mismanagement can build One Nation.

Share this article:

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Post a comment

Comments are moderated, and will not appear on this weblog until the moderator has approved them. They must not exceed 500 words. Web links cannot be accepted, and may mean your whole comment is not published.

CHAPMAN & CO

The Chapman & Co blog takes you behind the scenes of the Westminster village with Fleet Street's finest political reporting team. Check here for the latest news, analysis, gossip and scandal from the Daily Mail's Political Editor James Chapman, Deputy Political Editor Tim Shipman, Political Correspondents Jason Groves, Kirsty Walker and Gerri Peev and Whitehall Correspondent Daniel Martin.